Randy pushes out the bottom-most card, now, and it turns out to be a jack of clubs. On second thought he pulls that jack out and leaves it on his knee for the time being, so he won't mess the next part up. According to the mnemonic symbols he's marked on his fingernails, the numerical value of this jack of clubs is simply 11. So, starting from the top of the deck, he counts down to the eleventh card, cuts the deck below it, then swaps the two halves, and finally takes the jack of clubs off his knee and puts it on the bottom of the deck again.
The card on the top of the deck is now a joker. 'What's the numerical value for a joker?' he asks, and Enoch Root says, 'it's fifty-three, for either one of them.' So Randy gets a free ride this time; he knows that if he begins counting down from the top of the deck, when he reaches 53 he'll be staring at the last card. And that card happens to be the Jack of Clubs, with a value of 11. Eleven, then is the first number in the keystream.
Now, the first letter in the ciphertext that Enoch Root wrote on the napkin is O, and (setting the deck of cards down, now, so that he can count through the alphabet on his fingers) O is letter fifteen. If he subtracts eleven from that, he gets four, and he doesn't even have to count on his fingers to know that letter number four is D. He has one letter deciphered.
Randy remarks, 'We still haven't gotten to your being arrested.'
'Yes! Well, it's like this,' says Enoch Root. 'Mr. Wing has been digging some holes of his own up in the jungle lately. A lot of trucks have been going through. Ruining the roads. Running over stray dogs, which as you know are an important food source for these people. A boy was hit by one of these trucks and has been in our hospital ever since. The runoff from Mr. Wing's operations has been fouling the river that many people rely on for fresh water. And there are questions of ownership too-some feel that Mr. Wing is encroaching on land that is properly owned by the government. Which in some extremely attenuated sense, means it is owned by the people.'
'Does he have a permit?'
'Ah! Once again your knowledge of local politics is evident. As you know, the normal procedure is for local officials to approach people who are digging large holes in the ground, or undertaking any kind of productive or destructive activity whatsoever, and demand that they obtain a permit, which simply means that they want a bribe or else they'll raise a stink about it. Mr. Wing's company has not obtained a permit.'
'Has a stink been raised?'
'Yes. But Mr. Wing has forged a very strong relationship with certain Filipinos of Chinese ancestry who are well placed in the government, and so the stink has been unavailing.'
The second time through, the joker-moving part went quickly since one of the jokers started out on top. The King of Hearts ends up on the bottom, and hence on Randy's knee. That son of a bitch has a numerical index of 39, and so Randy has to count most of the way through the deck to reach the card in the thirty-ninth position, which is a ten of diamonds. He splits and swaps the deck, then puts the King of Hearts back on the bottom. Top card is now a four of diamonds, which translates to an index of seventeen. Counting the seventeen top cards into his hand he stops and looks at the eighteenth, which is a four of hearts. That works out to a value of 26 + 4 = 30. But everything here is modulo 26, so adding the 26 was a waste of time, because now he has to subtract it right off again. The result is four. The second letter in Enoch's ciphertext is S, which is the nineteenth letter in the alphabet, and subtracting four from that gives him O. So the plaintext, so far, is 'DO.'
'I get the picture.'
'I was sure that you would, Randy.'
Randy doesn't know what to make of the Wing business. It puts him in mind of Doug Shaftoe's yarns. Maybe Wing is looking for the Primary, and maybe Enoch Root is too, and maybe the Primary is what Old Man Comstock was trying to find by decrypting the Arethusa messages. Maybe, in other words, the location of the Primary is sitting on Randy's hard drive right now, and Root's worried that Randy, like an idiot, is going to give it away.
How'd he arrange to get into a cell next to Randy's? Presumably the Church's internal lines of communication are first-rate. Root could have known for a few days that Randy was in the clink. Time enough to hatch a plan.
'How'd you end up here, then?' Randy asks.
'We decided to raise a bit of a stink ourselves.'
'We being the Church?'
'What do you mean by the Church? If you are asking me whether the Pontifex Maximus and the College of Cardinals put on their pointy bifurcated hats and sat down together in Rome and drew up plans for a stink, the answer is no. If by 'church' you mean the local community in my neighborhood, almost all of whom happen to be devout Catholics, then yes.'
'So the community protested, or something, and you were the ring leader.'
'I was an example.'
'An example?'
'It frequently does not occur to these people to challenge the powers that be. When someone actually does, they always find it incredibly novel, and derive much entertainment from it. That was my role. I had been making a stink about Mr. Wing for quite some time.'
Randy can almost guess what the next two letters are going to be, but he has to keep working through the algorithm or the deck will get out of whack. He generates a 23 and then a 47 which, modulo 26, is 21, and subtracting the 23 and the 21 from the next two ciphertext letters K and J (again, modulo 26) gives him N and O as expected. So he has 'DONO' deciphered. And continuing to work through it, one letter at a time, the cards getting a little sweaty in his hands now, he eventually gets DONOTUSEP and finally loses his place while trying to generate the last keystream letter. So now the deck is out of whack and completely unrecoverable, reminding him that he'd better be careful next time. But he can guess that this message must be: DO NOT USE PC. Enoch is worried that Randy did not anticipate Van Eck phreaking.
'So. There was a demonstration. You blocked a road or something?'
'We blocked roads, we lay down in front of bulldozers. Some people slashed a few tires. The locals put their ingenuity to work, and things got a bit out of hand. Mr. Wing's dear friends in the government took offense and called out the Army. Seventeen people were arrested. Unreasonably high bail was set for them as a punitive measure-if these people can't get out of jail they can't make money and their families suffer terribly. I could get bailed out if I wanted to, but have elected to stay behind bars as a gesture of solidarity.'
It all seems like a plausible enough cover story to Randy. 'But I'm guessing that a lot of people in the government are appalled by the fact that they have thrown a saint into jail,' he says, 'and so they have moved you here, to the high-prestige luxury jail with private cells.'
'Once again your understanding of the local culture is conspicuous,' Enoch Root says. He shifts position on the bed and his crucifix swings back and forth ponderously. He also has a medallion around his neck with something startling written on it.
'Do you have some occult symbol there?' Randy asks, squinting.
'I beg your pardon?'
'I can make out the word 'occult' on your medallion there.'
'It says
'I was trained as an astronomer,' Randy says. 'So I learned all about occultation-the concealment of one body behind another, as during an eclipse.'
'Oh. Well, then, I'll shut up.'
'In fact, I know more than you might think about occultation,' Randy says. It might seem like he's beating a dead horse, except that he catches the eye of Enoch Root while he's saying it, and gives a significant sidelong glance at his computer. Root processes this for a moment and then nods.
'Who's the lady in the middle? The Virgin Mary?' Randy asks.
Root fingers the medallion without looking at it, and says, 'Reasonable guess. But wrong. It's Athena.'
'The Greek goddess?'
'Yes.'
'How do you square that with Christianity?'
